I love having something visual to keep me on track whilst I’m chipping away at our Debt Snowball, I like being able to see that I’m making progress even if I’m only throwing the odd pound at it every now and then (because we all know that those £1’s here and £2’s there add up!)
My favourite way to keep track of any money goal is by using a 1% Tracker, ‘Whats a 1% tracker?’ I hear you ask, let me explain…
‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time’
Turning one bite into 1%
The premise of the 1% tracker is simple, you’re just breaking down a big goal into smaller incremental goals. In this case it’s 100 1% increments and those 1% increments are represented by little squares.
Say you have a Goal of getting your £1000 Baby Emergency Fund, you just divide the £1000 by 100 to give you £10 and that’s the value of each 1% square.
Trackers are a great way to keep you accountable and reminding you of the end goal, I actually got the idea of using them for the Baby Steps after taking part in Emmas Make £1000 for Christmas Challenge where she shared her tracker and the idea of breaking things down into smaller steps.
How to use them for your debt snowball
You need a separate tracker for each individual debt (luckily I have made it so the printable has two trackers on each A4 printout)
Write the name of the debt at the top and add in the current balance, then get a calculator and divide the current balance by 100, whatever that result is is your 1%.
So if we’re looking at this example in the photo…
… the debt is to Barclaycard, The balance is £3000, I divided that by 100 to give me £30 as my 1% value.
Each time I throw money at my snowball I make sure to colour in the equivalent amount of squares, some months I might have an extra £15 left in the budget so I’ll only colour in half a square and because I don’t like having just half a square coloured in (because I’m a bit weird like that) it really pushes me to try to find another £15 to make it up to a full square, it gets quite addictive!
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Hi we’re really trying to get out of our debt and start budgeting saving planning trying to budget save for a rainy day and start to save for retirement and retirement planning.and start learning the right and wrongs of what we were never taught about at school.which should have been.as they teach you everything about absolutely everything else but nothing about finances.which is very important.
I 100% agree, I spent hour a week in secondary school having to do prep for university forms (when I told them over and over that I wasn’t going to Uni) that time could have been used to teach me how to do a budget or work our interest. It’s such a shame that they don’t seem to think it’s important 🙁